Housing Ombudsman ACR: repairs still drive harm, and the record is the weak point
The Housing Ombudsman's Annual Complaints Review for 2025/26 finds responsive repairs in 80% of cases and urges landlords to audit Awaab's Law triage. The ops lesson is dated repairs and complaint records that stand up when a case escalates.
The Housing Ombudsman published its Annual Complaints Review for 2025/26 on 15 September 2026. It covers cases determined between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026. Headline progress is real: more determinations, a lower uphold rate, and fewer severe maladministration findings. The ops story sits underneath. Responsive repairs still appear in most casework, damp and mould and leaks still uphold at high rates, and the Ombudsman is already seeing landlords struggle to identify Awaab's Law cases on time.
For social landlords taking on and running homes, that is a record problem as much as a policy problem. When a repair report arrives, the trail of dates, hazard type, ownership, and closure has to be ready before the complaint escalates.
What the review shows
Figures below are from the Housing Ombudsman Annual Complaints Review 2025-26 and the accompanying 15 September 2026 press release:
- 8,783 determinations in the year.
- 62% of complaints upheld, down from 71% the year before. Without the new complaints-handling check on every case, the uphold rate would still have fallen, from 68% to 65%.
- Severe maladministration findings fell to 470 (2% of findings), down from 714 (5%).
- £4.8 million ordered in compensation. Average compensation per upheld case fell to £703.
- Responsive repairs featured in 80% of cases and carried the highest severe maladministration rate of any category, at 5%. Over 65% of compensation related to responsive repairs.
- Condensation, damp and mould made up 34% of repairs complaints. Leaks made up 23%. Both upheld over 75% of the time.
- Windows, a new category this year, had an 80% uphold rate and a 10% severe maladministration rate among repairs complaints.
- Awaab's Law (the Hazards in Social Housing (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2025) came into force on 27 October 2025 for emergency hazards and significant damp and mould risk. Early cases in 2026-27 already show landlord teams struggling to identify when a case falls under the law and to hit the timescales.
The Ombudsman's three action areas for landlords are clear: treat repairs, especially damp, mould and leaks, as the priority service risk; audit whether complaints and repairs teams can spot Awaab cases and respond in time; and use the new complaints-handling benchmark to compare performance over time.
Learning from severe maladministration reports also keeps pointing at the same operational gaps: poor communication, missing or weak risk assessments, and inadequate record keeping and knowledge management. Those gaps are what turn a repair into a long, harmful case.
Why it matters for landlord aftercare and the home record
For the social landlord or housing association aftercare and customer care lead accountable for repairs complaints, the Guided Home buyer here, the review is not mainly about the first report. It is about whether your organisation can show what was logged, how the hazard was classified, who owned it, what interim steps were taken, and when it closed.
Residents are the beneficiaries of that record. The buyer is the landlord team that has to defend timescales and learning when the Ombudsman asks for evidence.
Where new-build stock is joining the portfolio, continuity matters earlier still. Plot-level defect capture on site has to survive into the landlord's lived-in repairs and complaints systems. Otherwise aftercare rebuilds the story from inboxes when damp, a leak, or a window failure is already on a statutory clock.
The relevant journey stages run from first report and triage, through repair and temporary measures, into complaint handling and lived-in aftercare. If the record breaks between those stages, uphold risk rises even when the physical fix was eventually done.
What to watch
Keep the ACR itself and the landlord performance tables open as primary sources, not only the press summary. Watch how Awaab cases accumulate in 2026-27 determinations, and whether landlords can show HHSRS-level hazard typing from the moment a report lands. Also watch windows as a rising category, because deferring responsive repairs into major works programmes is already drawing severe findings.
Related Guided Home reading on the statutory damp and mould framework and the wider hazard expansion: Awaab's Law Phase 2 preparation. Treat that post as context on the framework. Confirm the current Phase 2 in-force date from primary government sources before you rely on any calendar date in secondary coverage.
How Guided Home helps
When a repair escalates into an Ombudsman case, the question is whether you have a complete home record: what was reported, how it was classified, who owned it, what was done, and what was closed.
Inspections and Defects keeps a dated defect and repair trail through completion, DLP, and into aftercare for the landlord customer care team. Guided Site starts that trail on site, including offline, so new-build stock does not arrive as an empty history. Document Assurance helps show what commissioning and safety evidence existed at handover. Hugo answers from the resident's record after move-in, which cuts routine noise and leaves a trace of what was asked and answered.
If you want to see how that evidence trail compares with your current process, book a demo.
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